When news broke of an explosion inside Harvard’s neurobiology building early Saturday morning, every scientist who works with monkeys felt it—an involuntary jolt, a spike of cortisol, the silent thought: what if it had been us? Neither animals nor people were hurt, thankfully. It doesn’t appear to have been an attack. But it didn’t matter. For those of us who work with monkeys, the fear is always near the surface.

In this new Nature Communications study, Hartle, Kishida, Sands, Montague, and colleagues recorded neurochemical activity from the caudate nucleus of patients with Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor undergoing deep brain stimulation surgery. As the patients played a simple game deciding whether to accept fair or unfair offers of money, their brains revealed a molecular conversation in real time — one that distinguished the two diseases at the level of neurotransmitter signaling.

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